And Vaska listens, yes...

The quality of Rosobrnadzor experts has long been a concern for the scientific and educational community of Russia [1]. Thus, after the announcement of the deprivation of state accreditation of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninki), it turned out that the expert group of the department that assessed the university was headed by a lady with a third of her dissertation written off and publishing articles in “junk” journals [2].

A loud statement was made by Russian scientists on June 27, 2018, in which they write that the assessment of high-level educational and scientific organizations is entrusted by Rosobrnadzor to “people who not only have no authority in the scientific community and have not proven their competence in any way, but have also been convicted of the grossest violations of scientific ethics" [3].

On July 10, 2018, Rosobrnadzor announced an open competition [4] in the amount of 12.8 million rubles. to create information and methodological support for the activities of certified and accredited experts, whom this department will involve in carrying out control (supervisory) activities in 2018. Five companies took part in it: T-Inform (with a postal address in the basement of a house on Profsoyuznaya Street), Information Technologies of the Future LLC, Russian Academy of Sciences, Prosveshchenie Publishing House JSC and School World LLC.

The results were announced in early August. It should not be surprising that the winner of the competition was the Prosveshchenie publishing house, which in recent years has actively dominated the educational literature market and whose interests, judging by media publications, are lobbied by top education officials [5].

The only surprise is that the qualifications and experience of the project participants - experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences, who were selected by branches of the Academy of Sciences, were assessed by a single commission (chairman Yulia Izgorodina) as 0 points. More than 300 experts in legal and economic sciences, including 50 academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, turned out, in the opinion of the competition organizers, to be completely unsuitable for the tasks of the competition. The qualifications and experience of the participants from “Prosveshcheniya” were assessed at 50 and 50 points, respectively (with a maximum of 100).

At the same time, Prosveshchenie reduced the contract price to 10 million 496 thousand, and RAS to 12 million 160 thousand rubles. T-Inform took second place in the competition, offering to complete the work for 12 million 500 thousand rubles.

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1. meduza.io/feature/2018/06/25/pochemu-rosobrnadzor-zakryvaet-horoshie-universitety-kto-imenno-ih-proveryaet-stoit-li-za-etim-korruptsiya
2. meduza.io/news/2018/06/24/ekspertizoy-shaninki-zanimalas-kandidat-nauk-svetlana-nikonova-v-ee-dissertatsii-nayden-plagiat
3. About the situation with Rosobrnadzor . // TrV-Nauka No. 259 dated July 31, 2018, p. 3.
4. zakupki.gov.ru/epz/order/notice/ok44/view/documents.html?regNumber=0173100003118000018
5. svpressa.ru/society/article/198162/